Compile and Run Syncany on Ubuntu 11.04

Productivity Sauce

Jun 30, 2011 GMT

Dmitri Popov

Syncany is a relatively young project, but it already garnered the attention of the open source crowd as a potential replacement for Dropbox. Syncany's major attraction is its support for a wide range of storage back-ends: from good old FTP, to Amazon S3, WebDAV, and even Picasa. Better yet, additional back-ends can be easily added via plugins.

While Syncany is far from ready for prime time, you can compile the current version of it from the source code to see for yourself what all this buzz is about.

First off, install the required packages using the following command (don't forget to enable Canonical Partners' repository in Synaptic first):

Next, you have to switch to Sun JRE as the default Java runtime environment. To do this, run the sudo update-alternatives --config java command and select the appropriate item. Fetch then Syncany's source code by running the bzr branch lp:syncany command. In the terminal, use the cd syncany/syncany command to switch to the syncany directory. Finally, build Syncany,and start the application using the following commands:

ant
dist/bin/syncany.sh

If everything works properly, you should see Syncany's configuration wizard that guides you through the process of creating a synchronization profile. That's all there is to it.